Battle Looms Over Extent of Protection for Coho Salmon : Fisheries: An ‘endangered’ designation could close areas to logging, agriculture and development. But environmentalists warn of extinction threat unless strong measures are taken.

Federal officials are preparing this week to announce a strategy for the protection of a dwindling species of salmon, and no matter what they decide, political battles are expected to break out anew in the West’s ongoing environmental wars.

If the government eventually decides that the coho breed of salmon is an endangered species and that its spawning grounds need protection, those forest areas could be permanently off-limits to logging, agriculture and development from Northern California to the Canadian border.

Environmentalists are concerned that caving in to pressure from those interests and their political allies, on the other hand, could leave the coho--a silvery, feisty specimen of the noble pink-meat creature--on the verge of extinction in many coastal regions.

In California, the partisan scrapping over the coho is expected to become especially intense as Democratic lawmakers and environmentalists push for full protection while others, led by Wilson Administration officials, petition a federal agency for a more “flexible” ruling.

Measures to save the coho, a consultant to the California Legislature said, “will make the spotted owl look like the bird of paradise”--meaning the consequences will be vastly more far-reaching.

Protection and restoration of coho salmon by a formal listing under the Endangered Species Act would lay down new regulations stretching from Monterey Bay more than 1,000 miles north and up to 100 miles inland, often across private land in the case of California, said a spokesman for the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Acreage along spawning streams--about 600 in Northern California--where regulations could apply “is certainly in the millions,” said the spokesman, Brian Gorman.

The political skirmishing that has already broken out at the state level in California centers on how far the fisheries agency should go in recommending protective status prior to a final decision, expected in a year or more. Portions of the federal draft agreement were circulating in the Capitol on Monday, and supporters of tough regulation said they did not like what they saw.

State Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica) said it appeared that the federal fisheries agency has been co-opted by Gov. Pete Wilson’s Resources Agency into calling for a “threatened” status for coho rather than the more restrictive “endangered” listing.

From what he can tell, Hayden said, “the Clinton Administration has backpedaled from a finding that these fish are on the verge of extinction so as not to pick a quarrel with the Wilson Administration. . . . Presiding over extinctions is not what Presidents and governors are supposed to do.”

According to several fish biologists, coho salmon are in grave danger of dying out in California, their predicament worsening the farther south they range.

Biologist Keith Anderson of the California Department of Fish and Game said that of 18 streams in Santa Cruz County where coho once spawned, the number has dwindled to three, and in two of those “we’re lucky if there are a dozen fish left.”

Overall, coho salmon returning to California streams to spawn have been depleted from more than 200,000 five decades ago to about 31,000 today, according to UC Davis fish biologist Peter B. Moyle. Only 5,000 of those spawn on their own in the wild. The rest are hatchery fish.

Ocean fishing for coho salmon off U.S. shores has been prohibited for two years. Commercial fishing operators who land a coho while fishing for the more plentiful chinook salmon are required to return the coho alive to the sea.

But the threat to coho remains because of degradation of its inland, freshwater spawning grounds, often on lands where logging operations disturb the spawning and growing beds.

Hayden, who heads the Senate Natural Resources and Wildlife Committee, has taken the lead in the Senate in calling for the toughest protection rules for coho. In the Assembly, Democrats Byron Sher of Palo Alto and Dominic Cortese of San Jose have joined Hayden in calling for an endangered listing, which would mandate strict protections and restrict logging, damming and diversion activities in the coho environment.

All three lawmakers, along with another important committee chairman, Assemblyman Dan Hauser (D-Arcata), have complained to the fisheries agency of a “process [aimed at lesser protection for the coho] being driven by the political agenda of Gov. Wilson’s Administration.” The four legislators, each the chairman of a wildlife-related committee, said they objected to being left out of federal planning on which the fate of coho salmon depends.

By contrast, Wilson’s lead Resources Agency official on the salmon issue, John J. Amodio, has lobbied for less than full endangered species listing of the coho before congressional committees in Washington and in consultation with fisheries officials on the West Coast.

Amodio said in an interview that the state has already shown that cooperative efforts rather than rigid regulations can work in saving species that are in decline. He pointed to the state program to rescue the threatened gnatcatcher songbird in Southern California and the agreement in December to protect wildlife in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and still provide water supplies to millions of farm and city users.

In both those agreements, although the results remain to be assessed, all parties affected by protective measures were included in finding solutions.

Amodio said some of the “same principles and concepts” could apply in addressing a rescue effort for coho. But he said the inflexible rules that an endangered listing would mandate would rule out obtaining cooperation from all parties.

“Polarization has been tried, and it has achieved paralysis,” he said.

Environmentalists reply that Amodio’s approach leaves the fate of coho salmon in the hands of the state and such powerful interests as the large timber companies that operate along the streams where coho spawn and must spend the first year of their lives before running out to sea.

Logging operations, they said, are largely responsible for declining coho populations. Cutting logging trails that create silted runoff into streams and harvesting trees that provide the shade that cools the streams are devastating to coho, said Jeffrey P. Shellito, consultant to Hayden’s Natural Resources committee.

Only with an endangered listing will the coho’s extinction be reversed, Shellito said. Wilson and his bureaucrats, he said, talk of protecting coho and other declining species, but their measures fall short of doing the job.